Hangman Game in Python

Difficulty Level : Medium
Last Updated : 16 Jul, 2020

Hangman Wiki:
The origins of Hangman are obscure meaning not discovered, but it seems to have arisen in Victorian times, ” says Tony Augarde, author of The Oxford Guide to Word Games. The game is mentioned in Alice Bertha Gomme’s “Traditional Games” in 1894 under the name “Birds, Beasts and Fishes.” The rules are simple; a player writes down the first and last letters of a word and another player guesses the letters in between. In other sources, [where?] the game is called “Gallows”, “The Game of Hangin”, or “Hanger”.

Implementation

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This is a simple Hangman game using Python programming language. Beginners can use this as a small project to boost their programming skills and understanding logic.

The Hangman program randomly selects a secret word from a list of secret words. The random module will provide this ability, so line 1 in program imports it.
The Game: Here, a random word (a fruit name) is picked up from our collection and the player gets limited chances to win the game.
When a letter in that word is guessed correctly, that letter position in the word is made visible. In this way, all letters of the word are to be guessed before all the chances are over.
For convenience, we have given length of word + 2 chances. For example, word to be guessed is mango, then user gets 5 + 2 = 7 chances, as mango is a five letter word.

# Python Program to illustrate 
# Hangman Game
import random
from collections import Counter
  
someWords = '''apple banana mango strawberry 
orange grape pineapple apricot lemon coconut watermelon
cherry papaya berry peach lychee muskmelon'''
  
someWords = someWords.split(' ')
# randomly choose a secret word from our "someWords" LIST.
word = random.choice(someWords)         
  
if __name__ == '__main__':
    print('Guess the word! HINT: word is a name of a fruit')
      
    for i in word:
         # For printing the empty spaces for letters of the word
        print('_', end = ' ')        
    print()
  
    playing = True
     # list for storing the letters guessed by the player
    letterGuessed = ''                
    chances = len(word) + 2
    correct = 0
    flag = 0
    try:
        while (chances != 0) and flag == 0: #flag is updated when the word is correctly guessed 
            print()
            chances -= 1
  
            try:
                guess = str(input('Enter a letter to guess: '))
            except:
                print('Enter only a letter!')
                continue
  
            # Validation of the guess
            if not guess.isalpha():
                print('Enter only a LETTER')
                continue
            elif len(guess) > 1:
                print('Enter only a SINGLE letter')
                continue
            elif guess in letterGuessed:
                print('You have already guessed that letter')
                continue
  
  
            # If letter is guessed correctly
            if guess in word:
                k = word.count(guess) #k stores the number of times the guessed letter occurs in the word
                for _ in range(k):    
                    letterGuessed += guess # The guess letter is added as many times as it occurs
  
            # Print the word
            for char in word:
                if char in letterGuessed and (Counter(letterGuessed) != Counter(word)):
                    print(char, end = ' ')
                    correct += 1
                # If user has guessed all the letters
                elif (Counter(letterGuessed) == Counter(word)): # Once the correct word is guessed fully, 
                                                                # the game ends, even if chances remain
                    print("The word is: ", end=' ')
                    print(word)
                    flag = 1
                    print('Congratulations, You won!')
                    break # To break out of the for loop
                    break # To break out of the while loop
                else:
                    print('_', end = ' ')
  
              
  
        # If user has used all of his chances
        if chances <= 0 and (Counter(letterGuessed) != Counter(word)):
            print()
            print('You lost! Try again..')
            print('The word was {}'.format(word))
  
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        print()
        print('Bye! Try again.')
        exit()

Note: Please run the program on your terminal.

omkarpathak@omkarpathak-Inspiron-3542:~/Documents/
Python-Programs$ python P37_HangmanGame.py 
Guess the word! HINT: word is a name of a fruit
_ _ _ _ _ 

Enter a letter to guess: m
_ _ m _ _ 
Enter a letter to guess: o
_ _ m o _ 
Enter a letter to guess: l
l _ m o _ 
Enter a letter to guess: e
l e m o _ 
Enter a letter to guess: n
l e m o n 
Congratulations, You won!

Try it yourself Exercises:

You can further enhance program by adding timer after every Guess
You can also give hints from the beginning to make the task a bit easier for user
You can also decrease the chance by one only if player’s guess is WRONG. If the guess is right,
player’s chance is not reduced

This article is contributed by Omkar Pathak. If you like GeeksforGeeks and would like to contribute, you can also write an article using contribute.geeksforgeeks.org or mail your article to contribute@geeksforgeeks.org. See your article appearing on the GeeksforGeeks main page and help other Geeks.

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